Vice President Blowhard?

Joe Biden brings a lot of baggage to the job.

by: barrett kalellis | published: 08 25, 2008

One of the innumerable TV talking heads made the prescient observation last week that Senator Joe Biden “doesn’t have an off button.” He doesn’t have a lot of other buttons, either, like an honesty button, a non-partisan button or a modesty button.

What he does have is a big ego button, a narcissism button, windbag, arrogance and phony buttons and a huge B.S. button.

Senator Hairplugs and Capped Teeth – he has more than a shark – has been around Washington longer than anyone can remember, and like his running mate, went right from law school to pursuing a political career, which tells you something about their real experience and motivation.

It is ironic that most Democratic-leaning pundits believe that Biden will add heft to Obama’s quest for the presidency, when nobody paid him any attention during the Democratic primaries and he was not able to gain any traction whatsoever. The only real asset he brings is his preternatural attack dog demeanor, which fits in with his arrogance and B.S. quotient.

Biden’s widely touted foreign policy experience is a canard, being rather a catalog of what not to do. As chairman of the foreign relations committee, he can raise a lot of dust and fog, but his judgments and pronouncements are generally wrong-headed.

Even though he voted for the Iraq War, once it proved a tenuous proposition, his solution was to partition the country according to religious sects and summarily withdraw the troops come hell or high water.

Senator Biden has rightly declaimed against the use of the term “war on terror,” but has nowhere shown that he understands the various facets of global jihad and what it is about Islam that motivates our enemies. And he has never articulated a position on how he would deal with subversive Islamic movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. and other western countries.

Biden is also supposed to woo Catholic voters during the campaign, but he is pro-choice, and this will put his verbal obfuscations to good effect in heavily Catholic dioceses in the contested states.

In his remarks in Springfield, Ill. on Friday, Biden prated about how the “direction of America,” nay, “the direction of the world” needed to be changed, specifically under his, and Barack Obama’s leadership.

Leadership? From a presidential candidate with no real experience in anything except in community political organizing? From a wizened pol, steeped in the wiles of Washington, keen on using socialized government edicts to try to solve issues like energy by tinkering with regulatory policies and favoring certain industries with tax advantages?

Like his running mate, Biden is in thrall to the liberal-left positions on almost every issue, including maintaining the ban on offshore oil drilling, signing international global warning pronouncements, stuffing the Supreme Court with liberal judges, and supporting new and expensive federal government programs (which they call “investments”) designed to fix problems, but that generally only increase taxation and government bureaucracy.

Regardless of whether these programs work or not, Obama, Biden and their Democrat cohorts will tout them all as examples of their public-spirited “leadership.”

It’s no accident that Obama has been pegged as the most liberal member of Congress and Biden follows as number four on the list.

One reason that Biden was a non-starter in the Democratic primary is the perception that he cannot be trusted at face value. People recall that in a previous presidential run, Biden plagiarized parts of a speech by British Labour Party leader Neal Kinnock. And, in another case, he falsified his educational record.

The Democrat strategy to get these two elected follows a familiar pattern: blame Bush and the Republicans for everything (and link McCain to the current administration), repeat the stultifying mantra of “change,” and promise vague, unspecified programs to bring this about, without spelling out how they will be funded.

It’s the same old liberal playbook theatrics, enhanced by carefully staged appearances, lots of rock music and mindless liberal entertainers.

So far, Obama’s campaign commercials are cleverly worded half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies, buttressed by big budgets that afford maximum media exposure in tight districts. Talk about the Selling of the President 2008. Joe McGinness, call your office.

Joe Biden should take to heart one of the famous fables of Aesop, in which a man considered himself a fine singer, since to his ears, he sounded great in the shower where the sounds reverberated and were amplified by the stone walls.

Thinking to gain the approbation of the public, he went into the market and began to sing, whereupon the people promptly picked up the nearest rock and threw stones at him. Are you listening, Joe?

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